Posts Tagged ‘ppc’
Doing some thinking about AdSense’s PPC Algorithm I developed the idea that it may be best to not blend your ads at all and to instead go for the default AdSense colors. This stands in contradiction to everything other webmasters and we have recommend.
It’s obvious that AdSense has an advanced algorithm for dertermining the Pay Per Click for AdSense publishers. It seems that that keyword bidding alone is not enough to determine how much we earn per click. Some sites targetting the same niche earn way less per click than others.
AdSense’s goal: The Advertisers
Without the advertisers spending marketing $ AdSense is not possible. Google has strong interest in ensuring their satisfaction to make them stick to AdWords. I analyzed this before in my post about AdSense in the recession. This is probably explains the fact that there is way more support for advertisers than for publishers.
This leads me to the following chestnut: Advertiser is King.
Following that statement implies drastic changes for us advertisers. We need to care about the advertisers paying for ads shown on our site.
Luv your Advertisers!
Imagine for one second you are a person trying to market your products using AdWords. You will want a perfect AdWords campaign yourself as you only have few marketing $.
- You only want Valid clicks that convert.
- You do not want to pay for other clicks (“missclicks”)
- You want maximum ROI from your campaign
- With high ROI you want to invest more and more.
Google AdSense wants to ensure exactly that, they want the advertisers to stick to AdWords and keep investing more and more.
What does that mean for us?
We need to ensure that the advertisers have maximum ROI. That is done by:
- Minimizing the amount of missclicks
- Ensuring that only visitors with an interest of buying something click the advertisements
The amount of missclicks can be reduced by not blending the ads. You heard right, I am suggesting the opposite effect – make your ads stand out to increase banner blindness. On the one hand all the visitors not interested in buying something will ignore the ads- Whereas on the other hand all visitors interested in buying something will not ignore the ads but proceed with clicking and lastly buying something. Of course, the amount of spontaneous buyers goes down as they initially ignore the ads due their banner awareness (removed with blended ads). Nonetheless, that definitely increases overall conversions for the advertiser and maximize his earnings.
Google will credit us with a higher Pay-Per-Click as we ensure conversions for the advertiser. Our overall PPC goes up, whereas the CTR goes down greatly.
Go for the default color palettes
With the above being correct you will want to go for AdSense’s default color palettes. Internet users are used to those palettes and know instantly that they are looking at an advertisement. By knowing that they will only click if they are really interested in purchasing the product.
That means, go for the layout Google uses in their Search Engine: Blue titles, black text and a green URL color. We need to make sure that the visitor instantly realizes he is facing an ad, exactly that is done by using Google’s default palette.
The question: Does PPC overweigh CTR?
I’d like to end this article with an open discussion and ask you the following questions:
- What overweighs? Will your earnings go up or down due to the change in both CTR and PPC?
- How long do you think it will take before you notice a change in PPC?
- What are your thoughts on this?
I don’t see though that any established business would ever test this out, as probably the cut back from CTR will greatly decrease the overall income.
As with everything related to AdSense, we need to test, test and test.
Trying out more than one advertising program on my forum I noticed something interesting: immediately after adding Kontera to my forum my Pay-Per-Click went down. It went down by around 40 %. Despite generating additional revenue through Kontera, my overall revenue went down due to the dramatic change in the PPC.
More revenue with additional Ad-Programs – Never!
I noticed something similar a while ago when I was using a Popunder code by Valueclickmedia on my site. After removing the codes the PPC went up right away. Exactly the same thing now happened this week with Kontera. The test period has only been 3 days because the reduction in income really hurt, but right after removing the Kontera code the PPC immediately went up to the same value.
Why could evil AdSense do that to us publishers?
On the one hand there is a simple explanation:
AdSense does not have any real competition, with their monopoly they are easily able to do whatever they want with us. We are forced to accept that they do not want us to have other ad-programs along then.
On the other hand it may be a consequence of AdSense’s algorithm. I previously explained that it’s rationale if AdSense takes all their data into consideration for the determining the PPC. That way AdSense is able to perfectly adjust the AdSense PPC depending on the quality of the clicks. That way they are for example able to reduce the PPC for sites which have a lot of missclicks (accidental clicks for example).
My idea is that AdSense reduces the PPC due to the fact that the quality of our clicks is reduced. The quality is reduced because you distract your visitors from clicking your AdSense ads right away. They focus on the other ads on your site and then even be less interested in the AdSense ads. That does not conclude that your CTR goes down, but may subconsciously lead to less conversions per click for the advertiser.
Discussion – what are your thoughts on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say :-).
Chitika – sounds like a banana, but stands for one of the best CPC programs out there. We’ll give you a nice Chitika review here, one thing to start, sign up for Chitika, you’ll not regret it. Finishing our Chitika review you’ll understand why…
There are good and bad advertising programs in terms of revenue for the publisher. Good ones in general are Google AdSense, YPN, Adsdaq and ….. Hmm well, can’t think of any other good advertising programs. I have been testing a couple of programs and most of them are just crap. They try to copy Google AdSense and fail greatly because they will never be able to have more advertisers than AdSense. They aren’t innovative. Good news, Chitika is a new, innovative and good CPC program.
What’s special about Chitika?
Relevancy for local Pizza ads
To understand why Chitika is a good advertising program you need to understand in which particular situations Google AdSense is unable to bring the publisher good revenue. Google AdSense puts everything into displaying content relevant ads, which is a good idea hence that way both publisher and advertiser earn more money. Less relevant ads means less conversions after clicking on the ad resulting in less revenue for the advertiser and consequently less money for the publisher. Now comes the part what makes Chitika special: Chitika does not scan the content of the page to display relevant ads, they scan the search strings which were used to enter the website.
By just looking at for example “Pizza in New York” compared to thousands of lines of unnecessary code Chitika is able to display extremely relevant ads. Sometimes even more relevant than Google AdSense (more at the end of this review)…..
By displaying relevant ads they are able to pay the publisher top CPC rates because the Return of Investment for the advertiser is very high (advantage of content relevant ads). One example: Dating ads on a website about insurance will most likely result in absolutely no conversions. It’s very easy to test how relevant your Chitika ads will be. Go to a website who runs Chitika ads and append “#chitikatest=New York Pizza” to the end of the URL, press enter and reload the website. You should then see advertisements about whatever you entered, in my case New York Pizza. If you are looking for a URL then just go to Wikihow. One special example I would like to point out is this url. The drink “New York Egg cream” is something special for New York. Have a look on the link and then compare the relevancy of the AdSense ads with the relevancy of the Chitika ads. Google only shows general new york ads whereas Chitika shows ads of local stores. Amazing isn’t it?
Chitika’s Ad Layout
Psychologically optimized ads
When I first had a look on the default layout of Chitika’s ads I was amazed. I previously made a post about psychological AdSense optimization where I talked about colors and all that. The layout is extremely important as it decides whether the user clicks on the ad or doesn’t.
Chitika offers all methods of optimizing your ads, changing the title color, text color, border color and URL color. That’s of course what Google offers as well but there is one significant difference. Google’s TOS disallows placing images next to your advertisements because they think that that could somehow encourage the user to click the ads. What’s the big deal? That only means more money. The visitor sees the image and then automatically focuses the ad unit next to it resulting in more clicks. That’s a clever trick which Chitika automatically implements. Check out the picture, Chitika automatically displays relevant images next to the ads! Amazing, I was stunned when I saw that the first time. That of course means more revenue for you.
How much revenue can the Chitika publisher expect?
First thing we talked about was the relevancy of the ads. The relevancy is the main factor for high CPC. Chitika is able to display relevant ads as I showed you above. The result is a CPC as high as together with AdSense. I even have a higher CPC on my gaming site with Chitika than with AdSense. That’s because AdSense performs really poor for everyone in the Gaming niche. The CPC you can expect lays anywhere between 75 and 125 percent of your AdSense CPC.
Next factor is the Click Through Rate (CTR), by allowing major customizations and placing images next to the ads the Chitika CTR lays somewhere between 100 and even up to 250 percent of your AdSense CTR. Please keep in mind that most people don’t use Chitika to replace AdSense but as an additional ad on the website. Look at Wikihow above, they are using 3 AdSense content units and 1 Chitika unit near the footer. The footer is a relatively bad placement (see the heat map), but still the owner reported a CTR of above 1 percent, which is tremendous! By using Chitika as additional source of income you are able to increase your total earnings by 10-20 percent. Do you want to miss that?
For which sites does Chitika perform best?
No text content?
Chitika performs very good for all websites. The sites AdSense performs bad for are the sites Chitika performs very good for. Poor text-content websites for example.
The AdSense crawler is unable to find any content to display AdSense ads on video sites for example. They are not able analyze the video, they can only check out the description of the video, the title, the tags or the comments. In a lot of cases those aren’t however that relevant. Chitika is able to display relevant ads for the visitor by just analyzing the tiny search string which reveals what the visitor was actually looking for!
All websites work well together with Chitika, the best websites are in my opinion video sites and also local sites (see the Pizza example above).
In terms of CPC the same niches as with AdSense peform best. That’s simply because the ROI for the advertiser is high (the advertiser earns a lot if someone purchases something) and resulting in spending more money into ad-campaigns. Car sites, Insurance sites, medical sites, foreclosure sites, lawyer sites, local sites and a lot more perform really good. Low paying niches are the same as together with AdSense, but that’s not the fault of the advertising program, it’s the problem of the niche. My niche is relatively low paying but still I am earning more than before.
Interview with Chitika Account Manager
I was so stunned by Chitika that I immediately started writing on this blog post and thought “Hey! Why not talk to someone from the Chitika company?”. Two days later Vik Chhabra (@vikc) joined me in an interview overviewing and explaining Chitika. Of course also all the benefits Chitika has were subject of the talk. Thanks again to you for the informative interview!
The video is in HD by default, you can turn it off in the player if your internet connection is too poor performing (I have a friend who still downloads at 30 kb / second LOL). Feel free to contact Vik in case you are interested in joining Chitika, he will assists you with all the questions you have and setting up your Chitika account. Make sure to mention that you came from us and he will put you on his top priority list!
We found another nice interview with Alden DoRosario (@adorosario) on the SESNY. Worth watching, good information:
Others on Chitika
There are a lot of positive and of course negative comments from other people on Chitika. Here are some found on the Chitika site itself:
Brandon from FitBuff.com said: I had heard good things about Chitika, but it was just one of those things that I never quite got around to checking out. Finally, I went to the website, had the code installed in minutes, and Chitika instantly became one of my top revenue sources in the first month! There was literally no learning curve or optimization, so I’m sure my results will be even better once I delve deeper. I simply input the code in the appropriate spot, and I was done. One of the best things about the ads is that they are only shown to visitors who arrive at my site via search engines, so the “regular readers” aren’t bogged down by more ads, even though Chitika is earning nearly as much as the ads that are always visible!
Arnold Alting from downloads.nl said: Chitika | Premium works great for us. A good Google Adsense alternative with very well targeted ads.
Carl from carlpei.com said: The best part of Chitika has to be the support! I have Ryan from Chitika on my MSN list and he’s always ready to chat. I’m a small publisher, this gives a very personal feeling.
@TomRoyce from House Meets Owner said: I use Chitika on a hobby site and it earns 3x more than adsense does for the same # impressions.
@trentiles from Dubs in the Buff said: Only have been using Chitika for a few days. So far good experience but I wish I could customize the ads more such as borders, etc.
We recently placed a thread on our forum about removing the borders from Chitika ads.
Own Experience
I have been using Chitika for almost a month now, mainly to get away from AdSense as only source of income. My website is in the gaming niche not a that good niche in terms of advertising because of the young audience and no really expensive products. Nonetheless my Chitika CPC is 30 percent higher than my AdSense CPC, which stunned me at first because AdSense was priorly the program that got me the highest CPC. Looking at my monthly revenue now around 20 percent comes from Chitika which is not that much of course. But considering that only 10 percent of my search engine visitor see the ads and generate 20 percent of my total income then yes, that’s a nice in earnings. I am really satisfied.
Signup for Chitika
We hope that we were able to bring Chitika a littler closer to you. You probably still have lots of unanswered questions but don’t wonder, every advertising program is like a unique new world. We can only recommend you to sign up for Chitika and test it yourself, it’s free of course.
Some bloggers are relatively unsatisfied with Google Adsense or other advertisement networks. You must know that there are other, still good networks. The market grows fast and still has open space for new advertising companies. I have been using several advertisement programs now and would like to give you some tips which advertisement programs are good.
You gotta decide between PPC (also known as CPC, stands for Pay per click), PPA (also known as CPA, stands for pay per affiliate and CPM (PPM, pay per impression). Some blogs tend to work better with CPA programs, others with CPC programs and others with CPM programs.
I made the experience that CPC programs run best when you have a niche blog. Your blog should not be about different topics, only about one. That way the CPC-programs can easily put related advertisements on your website which then tend to be clicked by your visitors more often. One very good advertising program is Google Adsense (you probably know it, if not you must be a newby lol). Because of the intense amout of advertisers Google is able to put extremely relative ads on your websites. As said before, the advertisements are appealing to the visitors and will consequently get clicks. To make it a little easier to understand: Let’s say your blog is about lawyers in a district of New York – there is an advertiser interested in putting advertisements on websites about exactly that topic. The ads are shown the user and they click on them because they were looking for a lawyer. Always keep in mind that the success to Google Adsense is the niche relevancy and the amount of clicks. The more clicks, the more money. The relevanter the better earnings per click (general sites suffer from smart pricing). I have mainly worked with Google as CPC program, but alternatives are Yahoo, Bidvertiser and some others of which I currently forgot the names.
The next category of advertisement are CPM ads. Those advertisements will get you money per impression. Sounds great because it is independent on clicks, however, those advertisement programs usually tend to pay out less. They do not have as targeted ads as the CPC programs, therefore do not have a large ROI (return on investment) for the advertiser. For me they pay out around 50% of what google-adsense pays. Usually you are forced to use those programs simply because you either got banned on adsense, or notice that your money per click gets lowered drastically. I worked togehter with some of them and made best experiences with: Adsdaq and Tribalfusion. If you need wellpaying pop-unders then Valueclick is the network to go. Their pop-unders pay out like on no other network. Cpxinteractive is good if you want income without really doing something. Just place their code and you can expect medium-earnings. The prior networks pay out well if you dedicate some time to play around a little. I will be writing a post about ad tiering for more money soon (helps to get more money out of CPM ads).
An alternative might be CPA advertisements for you. There some niches that are known to payout very well with affiliate advertisements. The dog niche for example will make you rich with CPA ads… You probably ask yourself why – in fact I did so too… It is fairly easy to understand – look at the audience of people that are interested in dogs. Most of them are 30+ and already have an income. Those people have money and usually (at least in Western-countries) do everything possible for the health and good of their pet. Those people are eager to buy products, the conversion rate is extremely high. An example: A dog is suffering from a disease – the person owning the dog searches for help on the internet and then finds your website. The person sees an advertisement related directly to her problem. The chance is high that she will click it and perhaps buy the product. So if the product costs around 500$ (some people pay that for the good of their dog) – then you get around 15% – what is 75$. Some friends told me that their sites where extremely well converting with a conversion rate of almost 5%! Wish I had such a blog and could run CPA advertisements hehe. Popular ones are the Ebay Commission Junction, Amazon-ads or Google Adsense. I have once been trying Zanox – but they scammed me around 200$. I am still waiting for a payout. Would love to know if you made better experiences with them.
CPA advertisements really depend on the niche – for example on my main website (it is about computer games – D3scene.com) – I would not be able to make any profit from Affiliate advertisements. The audience is maily around 15 years old. Most of the users do not even have a credit-card or paypal account. The chance that they really buy the product is very low. And the money behind a computer-game is not higher than 50$ – making it unattractive for gaming niches to run CPA ads.
Another possibility if your blog is about a specific software would be to use Pay-Per-Install advertisements. Those advertisements get you money whenever someone installs software. However, you will need to merge the software’s .exe with some kind of sponsor program .exe – which will make the audience of your blog never come back. Trust me, if a website tries to install crap on my computer I will NEVER even open them again. Zangocasg is the most popular one.
All in all you need to experiment – there is no 100% perfect advertising solution for your blog. The advertising niche changes every year and has new products which might increase your money. I recommend you to try out different advertisement programs and to see which one performs best for your blog. Not that I know everything, but I already know a decent amount – still – there is so much that influences your advertisements and I can not tell you the perfect solution. As stated above – experiment.
Many Adsense publishers are facing low money per click problems. One of the reasons for that is Google’s so called ‘Smart pricing’. I have been suffering from it myself. If you receive around 15 cent per click then you get around 5 when you got smart priced.
The money you earn per click varies, depending on different factors. However, the main factor is the niche. There are niches that payout more and niches that pay less. The lawyer niche for example is known for high payouts and the fun niche for low payouts. Nonetheless, when you get smart priced by google your earnings per click lower drastically.
I was earning around 15 cent per click on my gaming forum. Relatively good if you ask me until I noticed some day that the value per click dropped to 3-5 cent per click. That means only 30% of the earnings before. I was and am still a little disappointed about that. I dedicate this article to explain smartpricing and help you to get out of it. Keep in mind, it is nothing that you can do within a day, it will take at least 1-2 weeks until you notice changes….
Smart pricing was introduced by Google to protect the advertisers. The advertisers are investing money and expect a certain return when they invest (ROI = Return of Investment). Once the advertisers earn less money google reduces the price of the advertisement to make sure that the advertisers are getting money out of their investment. They do that because they want them to to cancel investing. If they get no money out of advertising they would simply stop advertising at all as they do not benefit from it. Google wants to help them by lowering the price of your advertisement. In fact, you have no influence on whether the advertisers earn something or not….
What sites are commonly influenced by smart pricing?
-Websites that have general content.
-Websites with extremely low conversion rates after clicking on ads (website’s with young readers)
-Forums in general
What Google says about smart pricing
The true algorithm of smart pricing is unknown, however, the adsense publisher team wrote the following on their blog:
1. Many factors determine the price of an ad
2. Clickthrough rate doesn’t affect advertiser return on investment (ROI)
3. Google doesn’t make money from ‘smart pricing’
4. Remember the old chestnut: “Content is King”
… Did you learn something from that quote? No me neither. Google always had the worst support… The only thing that helps us is point number two. Many people think that the CTR influences the price of the ad. No, why should it? Even Google says it is no factor at all because it does not influence the ROI. You get paid per click, if you experience lower clicks then you get less and the advertiser also has to pay less. If you have CPM Ads on your site then the clicks might be a factor for the ECPM but for CPC ads, no, that would be very unreasonable.
Ads only not on general pages
Content is King yes – that is something you should always have in mind. I had my advertisements in all forums on my gaming forum. Some of those forums were general (those forums where people can chat etc.). I removed all Adsense advertisements from general and offtopic pages to see if that would change anything. Same applies to blogs as well of course, remove your ads from your personal content. This just an example for forum owners to remove ads from general forums (vbulletin forum): Open up your templates and place the following around your adcode.
<if condition=”in_array($forum['forumid'], array(1,2,3,6))”>your google adsense code</if>
The code will only show the advertisements when the user is in the defined forums. Replace the numbers with your forum IDs. You can see them in the vbulletin forum manager if you hover over the forums. The number at the end of the link is the forum-id. If you want to show the code when the users are not in the defined forums then simply write a ! infront of the in_array. (!in_array…..)
That way I filtered my advertisements only to the most niche related forums (In my case that is World of Warcraft). After 2 weeks I have not noticed any changes in the adsense revenue. I have been smart priced before and the way I got out of it was by removing all google adsense advertisements from all my pages. I did that for around 3 weeks and then noticed higher revenues on clicks.
If you are running a blog and experience the smart pricing phenomenon then try to only place adsense on relevant pages. I sometimes write about current political events – if your blog is not related to that niche then you will want no advertisements on such pages. That could be a reason for getting smart priced.
The true factors of Smart pricing
• your websites niche relevancy
• conversion rate (how many people buy something after clicking the ads)
• advertisers ROI (return of investment) – higher conversion rate => higher ROI
• Authority (because advertisers bid more for having an ad on your site)
I can not think of other factors that could influence smart pricing. Keep in mind, google tries to help the advertisers. Unfortunately that does not really help the publishers – we generate the traffic with our websites…
How to get out of smart pricing
Smart pricing depends on the ROI of the advertiser. You can only influence the ROI by increasing the conversions after someone clicked your advertisement. That is in fact very difficult, because on the advertiser’s website you simply can not adjust or tweak anything. So to make sure your conversions are as high as possible you must put Adsense only on niche-relevant websites. General websites get general ads which perform poorly. Those ads are the reason for getting smart priced, so that’s what we want to avoid.
• Remove Adsense completely for 20 days. That will un-smartprice you.
• Until then work together with another advertsing program
• Once your 20 days passed put your Adsense back on, but only on the most relevant pages!
• Use section targeting to make your ads more relevant.
• Use Adsense channels to keep track of changes
So, good luck and let me know if my tips helped you! All in all, google really needs to do something to make smart pricing fairer. With Smart pricing Google Adsense seems to be no longer a CPC program. The conversions matter and conversions should actually only be a factor for CPA programs.
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